I Know I Promised Furniture, but . . .

Food is pretty important. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, it's a good deal more important than furniture, I'd say. So, with that in mind, I thought I would torment all of us with just plain food photos from Japan.

Zaru soba with mountain vegetables. The sauce is a soy-based sauce to which sugar, mirin, and dashi have been added. Mirin is cooking rice wine, and dashi is a dried and smoked fish stock. There is no fishy taste to it, however. Not in my opinion, anyway.

A bit blurry, but this teishoku (lunch set) is Tonkatsu—pork cutlet breaded in Panko, then deep-fried, served, usually, with shredded cabbage, white rice, pickles, and miso soup.

For all you food lovers out there, you have never seen anything until you've shopped in the basement floor(s) of major department stores in Japan. Above is just one sliver of the offerings available in the sweets section of Sogo department ("depaato", in Japanese) store in Yokohama. I think I'll show a few more before moving on to savories.

Isu-kuremu (ice cream).

Chokoreto (chocolate).

More sweets . . .

Including a green tea torte

and a selection of green teas to go with your sweets

Unless you would prefer to have a ko-hi (coffee) instead.

I believe that rather than make this post as long as the great wall of China, I shall save the savories for another post. It is after lunchtime by now, and all these sweets should be making people look forward to teatime, which, by the way, is observed in Japan.